A data center is a specialized facility that houses web sites and provides data serving and backup as well as other network-based services for subscribers. A data center in its most simple form may consist of a single facility that hosts all of the infrastructure equipment, such as networking and storage systems, redundant power supplies, and environmental controls. More sophisticated data centers are normally organizations spread throughout the world with subscriber support equipment located in various physical hosting facilities.
In a data center, various storage systems are interconnected via high-speed communication equipment. The storage systems are often operated and controlled by a Storage Management System (SMS). The SMS administers data center operations to monitor and configure the storage systems to perform storage operations. For example, the SMS may direct the storage systems to execute storage data transfer operations. One type of storage data transfer operation is a periodic data backup. A periodic data backup is configured to run on a periodic basis and may, for example, back up data from a primary storage system within the data center to a secondary storage system or from a secondary storage system to a tertiary storage system. Another type of data transfer operation is a synchronous data replication operation in which individual data write operations to a primary storage system in a data center are automatically mirrored to a secondary storage system, often in real-time.